Monday, September 21, 2009

The Unexamined Post is Not Worth Writing

Well friends, it just done got too late to come up with a whole new post, so I'm republishing this one, which is sort of a continuation of the themes brought out in the last two.

I don't know about you, but I really don't mind the stale bobservations, because I'm always surprised at what's in 'em. It's as if it's my first opportunity to actually read them, i.e., to view them as an object external to me. It's like what that clever feller said about learnin': the only new thing is the history you don't know.

I've never really thunk on it before, but I can't really "see" 'em when they're a-comin' out my melon. I suppose it's analogous to the difference between dreaming and then interpreting the dream. If you don't interpret it -- or at least ponder over it -- or dwell in it for a spell -- it's just "gone," as if it never happened. I guess you might say the unexamined post ain't worth a-writin'....

A link was wanting between two craving parts of Nature and he was hurled into being as the bridge over that yawning need. --Emerson

Placed on the borders of Time and Eternity, he holds himself somehow erect at the horizon of nature.... Spiritual perfection is his true nature. --Giordano Bruno

Each man ought to say to himself, "I was the creator, may I become again what I was." --Upanishads

Due to the Creator's involution, the creation is truly a bridge to nowhere, that is, in its descending mode into relativity. However, for that very reason, it is also a meandering bridge to.... one cannot say precisely where, because that implies some sort of horizontal destination. Rather, the creation is an ascending bridge from nowhere to nothing, nothing being understood as the apophatic God beyond our comprehension, or the light so blinding that it looks like darkness.

Which reminds me. Future Leader loves to play a game in which we "hide from Mommy" while she's out walking the dog. When she returns, she pretends to not be able to find us, which has the effect of ratcheting up the tension in Future Leader's mind as in a horror movie. Anyway, we were hiding in the dark under the blankets, and he shrieked, "I can't see my eyes!"

So if you are one of those scientistic Darwinian fundamentalists living in metaphysical darkness, the first thing to locate is your eyes. No, not the evolved eyes, but the uncreated eye of spirit that knows truth and not opinion, i.e., your vision. Or, as Schopenhauer observed, "The experimental sciences, when one occupies oneself with them for their own sake, studying them without any philosophical aim, are like a face without eyes. They then represent one of those occupations suitable to middling capacities devoid of the supreme gifts which would only be obstacles to their minute researches."

It's a matter of soul vs. spirit, or psyche vs. pneuma. When our childish troll hides beneath his metaphysical blanket and cries, "I can't see my third eye!," he's obviously referring to the latter: "With his soul (psyche) man engages in scientific or philosophical inquiry, analyzing the data of his sense-experience by means of discursive reason" (Ware). But if this were the extent of man's intellectual capacities, we would be no different from any other tenured beast wallowing around in his filthy pen of absolute relativism and amoral moralism.

Rather, "With his spirit (pneuma), which is sometimes termed nous or spiritual intellect, he understands eternal truth about God, or about the logoi or inner essences of created things, not through deductive reasoning, but by direct spiritual apprehension or spiritual perception." And it would be a shame if man were to look at scripture, of all things, with the eyes of the psyche instead of pneuma, for then he is fundamentally no different than the Darwinist who chucks his nous and looks at the creation with his beady lizard eyes, seeing only surfaces.

Again, let others argue over whether natural selection could have resulted in something as fantastically complex as the eye. But argue with no one who believes it could have resulted in something as fantastically simple as a transcendental eye that has the ability to see the celestial light that radiates through, and shimmers upon, the surface of being.

As JB would say, take us to the bridge: "All creatures are balanced upon the creative word of God, as if upon a bridge of diamond; above them is the abyss of divine infinitude, below them that of their own nothingness" (Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, quoted in Ware).

What does that wise crack remind me of, aside from the soul power and cosmic funkmanship of James Brown? Oh yes, p. 89: Wandering along the precipice of non-being, one side down and back into dark death and material dissolution, the other side up and beyond, into more subtle regions of Mind and Spirit:

Perhaps the worst thing about a modern education is that it teaches only about surfaces, never the Depths, as if the latter do not exist and are not the soul's proper environment. This is because of our unwise founders, who created a constitution which mandates a "wall of separation" between surface and depth, and therefore outlaws conservatism.

Rather, the founders clearly intended for secular leftism to be our state religion, and explicitly wished to prevent human beings from discovering both their spiritual essence and the nonlocal source of their liberty, at least in any publicly funded school. The reason they did this is because a spiritually rootless nation of material automatons is much easier to control with dogma, slogans, bumper stickers, and promises of material well-being without effort. This follows from our Declaration of Dependence, which proclaims that human beings are endowed by the state with various privileges, such as healthcare, free abortions, and the pursuit of pleasure.

Nevertheless, this leftist state religion has a downside. As Ware writes, "Modern man has for the most part lost touch with the truest and highest aspect of himself; and the result of this inward alienation can be seen all too plainly in his restlessness, his lack of identity and his loss of hope." This, I think, is the deeper meaning of Obama's superficiality. He is here to raise the spiritually dead with his inspirational hope-a-dope rhetoric, AKA, the emperor's new empty suit of cliches.

Now, if Man is a bridge, it is in both a spatial and temporal sense. That is, he spans all of the vertical degrees of being; but the higher he ascends, the more encompassing the horizontal view, no different than when you look at the city below from the top of one of them big skyscrapers. I would go so far as to say that if you don't have your head in the clouds, it might very well be up your ass. If you're not scraping the sky, then you're creeping the earth.

Now I am reminded of Joyce, and neither will you, but here goes anyway:

".... If you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs in this allaphbed! Can you rede its world?.... The meandertale, aloss and again, of our old Heidenburgh in the days when Head-in-Clouds walked the earth. In the ignorance that implies impression that knits knowledge that finds the nameform that whets the wits that convey contacts that sweeten sensation that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dogs death that bitches birth that entails the ensuance of existentiality...."

In fact, immediately after that passage is a quote that I used on the frontispiece of my doctoral dissertation, which you might say is "son of One Cosmos." Or I suppose it would be "father of One Cosmos." Anyway, When a part so ptee does duty for the holos we soon grow to use of an allforabit. In a similar vein, Somedivide and sumthelot but the tally turns round the same balifusion.

In a way, that summarizes the whole Doctrine, does it not? Which is fitting, because so does Man. He is the allforabit, a part so ptee who nevertheless does duty for the holos, no? And materialists try to divide and sumthelot, but that just ends in a fractured bog of a blob not a holygraphic blog of a bob. What I mean is, if you don't become spiritually whole again, you'll probably end up an intellectual hooligan.

Here, let's put it in plain English. As Ware writes, "Man stands at the heart of God's creation. Participating as he does in both the noetic and the material realms, he is an image or mirror of the whole creation, imago mundi, a 'little universe' or microcosm. All things have their meeting place in him." Yes, a part so ptee can do duty for the holos, but not without evolving there:

"Being microcosm, man is also mediator. It is his God-given task to reconcile and harmonize the noetic and the material realms, to bring them to unity, to spiritualize the material, and to render manifest all the latent capacities of the created order.... But in 'spiritualizing the body,' man does not thereby dematerialize it: on the contrary, it is the human vocation to manifest the spiritual in and through the material. Christians are in this sense the only true materialists."

Yes, this is indeed One Cosmos Under God. But only to the extent that we real-ize it, one youman beastling at a time.

The world is at once a passing shadow and a final fact....

The present is all that you have; and unless in this present you can find general principles which interpret the present as including a representation of the whole community of existents, you cannot move a step beyond your little patch of immediacy. --Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making

*****

Afterweird: I was thinking last night about how Sri Aurobindo measured his effect upon students, and it was mainly in their ability to compose "supramental poetry," which we won't get into here. However, I've noticed that I do something similar, in that I like to think that long-time readers begin to notice a new facility with language -- an ability to deploy language to make God present, so to speak. I certainly notice it in your comments. Sort of hard to describe, but if it has begun happening to you, then you know it. For those of you who are bobsequious enough to have the book, this transformation of language is discussed on pp. 107-109.

30 comments:

"Perhaps the worst thing about a modern education is that it teaches only about surfaces, never the Depths, as if the latter do not exist and are not the soul's proper environment."

Words, names and references abound, but zero meaning. Any idea how many years, how many semesters, begin with the same damn 'lesson' on Indians and how the white men wronged them?

Nary a mention about the Indians own (utter lack of a) concept of rights, or of the slaughter they practiced upon each other, or what it was that enabled the white men to travel upon heap big water house and cross the big water... or Why.

"Rather, the founders clearly intended for secular leftism to be our state religion, and explicitly wished to prevent human beings from discovering both their spiritual essence and the nonlocal source of their liberty, at least in any publicly funded school. The reason they did this is because a spiritually rootless nation of material automatons is much easier to control with dogma, slogans, bumper stickers, and promises of material well-being without effort. This follows from our Declaration of Dependence, which proclaims that human beings are endowed by the state with various privileges, such as healthcare, free abortions, and the pursuit of pleasure."

Or as that fine educator Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton Univ. and later, sadly, of the United States, once said

"We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks. "

"Wandering along the precipice of non-being, one side down and back into dark death and material dissolution, the other side up and beyond, into more subtle regions of Mind and Spirit..."

Poor anonymous. Bob's amazing psychic powers have sucked him into a vortex of boring, from whence he cannot escape. Oh, if only he could click away to another page, full of actual entertainment. Or just step away from the computer, which perversely won't allow him to view anything else besides Bob's boring blog. Why, there's a whole incredible universe out there, and it's a beautiful day to enjoy it, but no, such is not to be.

Anon.The fact that you think this blog sucks but can't help continuing to visit speaks more about you than it does of this blog.Of course, if you were aware of that, you wouldn't be quite the addlepate that you are.

mo·ron (môr'on)n.1. A stupid person; a dolt.2. Psychology: A person of mild mental retardation having a mental age of from 7 to 12 years and generally having communication and social skills enabling some degree of academic or vocational education.

I guess I'll have to stop using the term moron as a descriptor. According to the psychlogical description, it's actually a compliment to some of our trolls.

But argue with no one who believes [natural selection] could have resulted in something as fantastically simple as a transcendental eye that has the ability to see the celestial light that radiates through, and shimmers upon, the surface of being.

Hmmmm.

So, does this "fantastically simple" third eye that has no physical manifestation or other measurable effects, which detects light that is also otherwise indetectable, serve to provide an advantage in survival, or reproduction, or both?

So, does this "fantastically simple" third eye that has no physical manifestation or other measurable effects, which detects light that is also otherwise indetectable, serve to provide an advantage in survival, or reproduction, or both?

I planned to weigh in on the previous couple posts, but then came across my thoughts much better expressed in a terrific book I’m reading (sorry for the length):

“The relationship of science to the Bible hinges not only on how we read the scientific record but how we interpret certain key Biblical passages, such as Genesis 1. Christians who accept the Bible’s authority agree that the primary goal of Biblical interpretation is to discover the Biblical author’s original meaning as he sought to be understood by his audience. This has always meant interpreting a text according to its literary genre. For example, when Christians read the Psalms they read it as poetry. When they read Luke, which claims to be an eyewitness account (see Luke 1:1-4), they take it as history. Any reader can see that the historical narrative should be read as history and that the poetic imagery is to be read as metaphorical.

The difficulty comes in the few places in the Bible where the genre is not easily identifiable, and we aren’t completely sure how the author expects it to be read. Genesis 1 is a passage whose interpretation is up for debate among Christians, even those with a “high” view of inspired scripture. I personally take the view that Genesis 1 and 2 relate to each other the way Judges 4 and 5 and Exodus 14 and 15 do. In each couplet one chapter describes an historical event and the other is a song or poem about the theological meaning of the event. When reading Judges 4 it is obvious that it is a sober recounting of what happened in the battle, but when we read Judges 5, Deborah’s song about the battle, the language is poetic and metaphorical. When Deborah sings that the stars in the heavens came down to fight for the Israelites, we understand that she means that metaphorically. I think Genesis 1 has the earmarks of poetry and is therefore a “song” about the wonder and meaning of God’s creation. Genesis 2 is an account about how it happened. There will always be debates about how to interpret some passages – including Genesis 1. But it is false logic to argue that if one part of Scripture can’t be taken literally then none of it can be. That isn’t true of any human communications.”

This is true, Nomo.Jesus spoke almost always in parables. There is at least one time I recall where he explains one to his followers. So I believe it would be incorrect to think he would (cruel?) use another parable to explain the first one.

Hi gang. Thank you for the mention, Julie, and Rick. It's been a long summer, but it's over, and I need to start spending more time on line. As a sideline, I finally decided to nuke my membership over at Queegland's green-balled lizard club. I cut and pasted the whole 1200+name banned list (it only fit up to the "E's") in a post. Sharmuta accused me of hanging with stalkers. The post was nuked within seconds. I guess I'm now out of there.(sob)

What About Bob?

Who spirals down the celestial firepole on wings of slack, seizes the wheel of the cosmic bus, and embarks upin a bewilderness adventure of higher nondoodling? Who, haloed be his gnome, loiters on the threshold of the transdimensional doorway, looking for handouts from Petey? Who, with his doppelgägster and testy snideprick, Cousin Dupree, wields the pliers and blowtorch of fine insultainment for the ridicure of assouls? Who is the gentleman loaffeur who yoinks the sword from the stoned philosopher and shoves it in the breadbasket of metaphysical ignorance and tenure? Whose New Testavus for the Restavus blows the locked doors of the empyrean off their rusty old hinges and sheds a beam of intense darkness on the world enigma? Who is the Biggest Fakir of the Vertical Church of God Knows What, channeling the roaring torrent of 〇 into the feeble stream of cyberspace? Who is the masked pandit who lobs the first water balloon out the motel window at the annual Raccoon convention? Who is your nonlocal partner in disorganized crimethink? Shut your mouth! But I'm talkin' about bʘb! Then we can dig it!